Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Before doing the integration of Oracle Application Express (APEX) with E-Business Suite (EBs) you need to have both environments installed. The Oracle white paper talks about the installation of APEX, but not about installing E-Business Suite.

The white paper states; the prerequisites for the solution given are:

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 or above

Oracle E-Business Suite Patch 12316083

Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 or above

Oracle Application Express 3.2 or above

The first thing I needed was an E-Busisness Suite environment. Oracle provides some VM Templates for E-Business Suite 12.1.3. I wanted a complete demo system, like for example the HR schema in the Oracle database or the Sample Application in APEX. The VM Template for E-Business Suite includes the Vision demo.

I never installed EBs before, so I did some research how to do that. Finally I didn't proceed with installing E-Business Suite on our servers, as MCX was happy to provide us with a complete Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Vision installation on their servers. The version of the underlying Oracle database is 11.2.0.2.0. I also asked them to apply patch 12316083.

APEX needs to be installed on the same Oracle database as the Oracle E- Business suite database server.
We went with installing the latest version of APEX at the moment: APEX 4.1.

Installing APEX is not that hard, basically running some scripts. The only bit you have to be careful with is the choice of web listener. APEX supports three web listeners: mod_plsql, EPG and the APEX Listener.
The mod_plsql gateway is disabled by default by EBs R12, so you shouldn't go with that. The EPG is not recommended either as it will add additional load on the database server, so the best choice would be the APEX Listener. The APEX Listener is the recommended choice in any circumstance anyway, regardless of EBs. (on a related note; I'm giving a presentation about my experiences moving to the APEX Listener at OGh and ODTUG.)

So after installing APEX and using the APEX Listener on an EBs configuration, the architecture looks like this:

So now all the prerequisites are met and we can concentrate on the real integration part in the next post.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

For a couple of years now companies like for example Popay integrate APEX with E-Business Suite.

The learning curve of APEX is not that high, so people with a (technical) E-Business Suite background should be up and running in no time.

In April 2011, Oracle released a whitepaper how to Extending Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 using Oracle Application Express. Before, although it worked, you were a bit on your own incase you had issues, with the whitepaper things changed, so now you can call Oracle support as well.

In the next days I will share my experiences trying to get up-to-speed with integrating APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite. My background with Oracle E-Business Suite is limited, but I know a lot about APEX and that whitepaper should get me a big step further in integrating with E-Business Suite.

On the 15th of February, the APEX and E-Business Suite SIGs of OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group) hold a half day (FREE) seminar about this integration too. So if you want to see this integration live or you want to hear from companies who are successful in it, come and join us. You find the agenda below: